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Hoobellatoo began as the continuation of a musical friendship by other means. Elijah Shaw and Chris King started a rock band together in St. Louis back in the fall of 1989. Eventually, various band members drifted away to other callings; Elijah moved to Nashville to study recording studio technique and Chris deepened his studies of world folklore. These pursuits became Hoobellatoo, a multimedia documentary endeavor named after a simple West African concept, "beautiful people."
The transition to Hoobellatoo was prepared during the band's final East coast tour. With an afternoon open in Boston, we headed for Walden Pond. On the shore of Walden, Chris was joined by a small, intense African man named Nymah Kumah. Nymah narrated his fascinating story, how he grew up in the Liberian bush, came to this country as a missionary's slave and later became the lead dancer for Olatunji's Drums of Passion. When the band dwindled, Elijah and Chris packed up Chris' 87 Cavalier (The Birthplace) and drove back to Boston to record Nymah talking and drumming, Hoobellatoo was born.
Besides Nymah, Hoobellatoo has recorded Pops Farrar, a merchant marine who visited every continent on earth and learned their folk songs; Leo Connellan, the late poet laureate of Connecticut who wrote gritty street lyrics before anyone ever heard of Beat poetry; the R & B legend Rosco Gordon; a 90-something singer of spirituals from the Mississippi Delta, Mrs. Ann Pittman; political exiles from The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People; and traditional musicians from Madison County, North Carolina.
We have also embarked on the rather unusual project of making scruffy American music out of Turkish poetry in translation. Our first effort is Blind Cat Black, a disassociative prose poem sequence about an Istanbul boy prostitute by Ece Ayhan (translated by our friend Murat Nemet-Nejat). We have also started writing pop songs to the uncanny, offhanded poems of Orhan Veli (also in Murat's translation).
The philosophical basis for our work lies in the indigenous world�s belief in the ritual circulation of positive energy. When we met Nymah, he had never recorded his enormous traditional repertoire. The same is true of Pops Farrar, who had not performed in fifty years when we recorded him. We are trying to get the frustrated beauty of elders into circulation among the young; we also strive to keep exchange moving not only between generations but also genders, genres and ethnic identities.
Hoobellatoo has gone full circle back to our own music. Elijah and Chris have a new band, Three Fried Men, that operates in the same spirit as Hoobellatoo. Our primary songwriting mode is to take English translations of world literature and folklore and make them into songs in the American folk grain. The first record, Dance for an Orphan's Wedding, is now available at Skuntry.com.
